Psychoanalysis and Ethics: Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Erich Fromm's genital reflections on the nature of character can serve as a launching pad offering us the opportunity to delve a little more deeply into the complex arena of the intersection between psychoanalysis and ethics. Most of the psychoanalytic exploration of the issues of character, beginning with Freud's (1904) almost incidental remarks on character defects—"if the physician has to deal with a worthless character, he soon loses the interest which makes it possible for him to enter profoundly into the patient's mental life. Deeprooted malformations of character, traits of an actually degenerate constitution, show themselves during treatment as sources of a resistance that can scarcely be overcome" (p. 254)—through his later formulations rooted in his structural theory (1933) —"We have already made out a little of what it is that creates character. First and foremost, there is the incorporation of the former parental agency as a superego, which is no doubt its most important and decisive portion, and further, identifications with the two parents of the later period and with other influential figures, and similar identifications formed as precipitates of abandoned object-relations. And we may now add as contributions